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Steppin' Out with Geoffrey Tyler

Source: The Kurt Files
Date: May 3, 2011
Author: Tina Tyan


In over two decades of performing and entertaining people, Kurt Browning has shown the audience many sides of himself through his exploration of characters, music, and choreographic styles. With his Steppin' Out of My Mind program, he goes even further, giving the audience the chance to look right inside his head and ride along with his thoughts while he skates.

Lacking mind-reading technology, Kurt needed help translating his vision into reality. He found the perfect partner in his friend Geoffrey Tyler, a seasoned performer whose approach to his craft mirrors Kurt's in his willingness to try new things and push creative boundaries. Geoffrey worked with Kurt every step of the way, developing the concept, shaping the music, helping write the reworked lyrics and script, choreographing, recording the song, and even performing live with Kurt on the ice. As such, the friendly, gregarious Canadian is uniquely positioned to offer deep insight into the development of Steppin' Out, and he was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to talk in-depth with the Kurt Files about this unique program.

How a Lost Boy met Peter Pan

As a young boy growing up near Toronto, Geoffrey Tyler always knew that he wanted to be in show business. He loved to sing and dance and act, and refined his skills at the Etobicoke School of the Arts and the music theater program at the Sheridan College in Oakville. In his 20 year career "in the business", he's worked all over the globe in many mediums, from London's West End to the Stratford Festival to many of the major musical theater productions that come through Toronto. His website describes him as an "actor, singer, dancer, musician and director." Asked which of the many hats he wears is his first love, he found it hard to choose.

"I really do love them all equally. I find when I'm singing and dancing, I miss the acting, when I'm acting and dancing, I miss the singing, and so on and so forth," he says. "If I had to choose, if I was forced to choose, it would be hard to do without singing. That's sort of second nature to me. I can't imagine a day without music."

Like many other small-town Ontario boys, Geoffrey played hockey from a young age. He's long been comfortable on skates, but had little more than common interest in or awareness of figure skating; he watched the big events and knew of the big names, but otherwise didn't pay much attention. All that changed in 2007, when Kurt Browning stepped into his life.

Every year, Ross Petty puts on a Christmas panto show in Toronto. Panto has a long-standing tradition in the UK and Canada. The productions provide a hilarious, skewed take on a well-known story, and usually cast a celebrity who isn't typically known as an actor. In 2007, the production was Peter Pan, and when the opportunity to audition came up, Geoffrey didn't hesitate.

"It's one of those fun, fun things that you kind of hope you get asked to do at Christmas. Not everyone can, because there's only so many parts, but it's one of those jobs that's always really fun to do. You look forward to it if you get the chance," he explains.

Cast as Lost Boy Miguel, a temperamental Spanish chef, Geoffrey was intrigued to find that his Peter Pan was four-time World Champion figure skater Kurt Browning.

"You can't really be a Canadian without knowing who Kurt Browning is. My mom loved figure skating, and I remembered sort of watching him in his heyday, but more second hand," he says. "I honestly didn't know anything about him other than that. I just thought it would be, oh wow, Kurt Browning's going to be doing this. This is going to be interesting!"

Despite Kurt's lack of professional stage or singing experience, he quickly impressed Geoffrey during his first day of rehearsals when the full cast did a "sing-through" of the script.

"He's in a room with probably 20 other professional singers and dancers, and the first time he ever sang in public was then," he says. "And he was the first person to sing, because he sang the song at the top of the show."

"He was just so game, he was like 'ok, let's go, let's just try it out.' You almost forget that he's never done it before, because he seems to so easily throw himself into it. Like he doesn't seem to be stressed, or worried, or anything. He doesn't pretend to know what he's doing, but he doesn't pretend to not know what he's doing," he says.

"That's pretty extraordinary, actually, for someone, and certainly someone in his position, to be that sort of down-to-earth. It takes a lot of humility to be just sort of ready and raring to go."

A friendship was soon born that continued after the show's run. The two shared their respective talents with each other. When Kurt expressed regret that he didn't know how to play the piano in his house, Geoffrey quickly offered to give him lessons. Brushing off Kurt's desire to repay him somehow, Geoffrey jokingly suggested figure skating lessons, an idea that Kurt enthusiastically latched onto.

"He's like, that's a GREAT idea! So he found me a pair of skates, and it kind of started from there. It took a few times to get comfortable in figure skates. And now I have to say, I'm extremely comfortable in them. It's fun! I look for any chance to get them on."

An idea takes flight

Fast forward to 2010. Kurt was looking to flesh out a concept that he'd been contemplating for a while, and knew just who to turn to for help.

"Kurt had originally said to me, he said 'I've got this program that I want to do. I've always wanted to do this program where you can hear my thoughts [while I'm skating.]' And I thought, that's a very interesting premise, because you know, even actors, if you've been doing a show for a long time, even in the middle of some of the big tragedy scenes, just a little part of your brain is going 'did I leave my keys in my jacket or my pants pocket?'"

At the time, Kurt had just the idea, but no real conception of how to execute it. So the two of them started from scratch, throwing ideas back and forth and gradually building the program up piece by piece.

One of the fundamental components was the music, a part of the program Geoffrey could particularly help with, with his connections in the music industry in Toronto.

He explains, "Usually you get a song that's finished, away you go, and then you tailor your program to whatever that song dictates. But we were doing it the other way. We had to figure out what the song was going to be. Because I said to him, you can pick a prerecorded song, or you can pick a song that you like, and we can re-record it. And that way, you can have the song be anything you want. You can basically at your whim decide, oh I want it to change key here, I want it to go faster, I want it to go slower, I wanna change the lyrics, I want to do another part of the song. So once you do that, once you decide that you're going to rerecord the song, then you've got a lot more control, you've got a lot more that you can do."

Having decided to re-record their own version of Steppin' Out, Geoffrey helped hook Kurt up with Steve Thomas, who did the music arrangements, and the recording studio where they recorded the music. They then needed to flesh out the concept.

"The only way to sustain this, really, is if we kind of come up with a mini-storyline. Needs to be sort of a beginning and a middle and an end, in order to bookend it. If not, it just becomes a random jumble of thoughts, and that might not be exciting to people," he says. "We just kind of talked - what's the story, what do you want to say? You know, basically, it's, he's older, it gets harder, he's got more responsibilities in life, but he's still doing it, and why is he still doing it? And in the end, he realizes he's still doing it because he truly does love it."

Geoffrey's background also came into play in developing the choreography.

"He also then said I want it to be choreography that you'd see in the movies, not figure skating choreography. He said I want to do actual Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire stuff," Geoffrey explains. "So we got a bunch of old movies, and we watched all their steps and things like that, and we would video the screen to see the really cool steps ... Now that's another place where I come in, because I'm familiar with that kind of stuff, I grew up with that kind of stuff, I've danced those kind of things. So I could say, ok, well I'll stand on the carpet, and show it to you, and let's see if you can do it on the ice."

The whole thing needed to be shaped into a coherent structure.

"We said, ok what sections do we need? Let's break it up into four acts. It's basically what we had. We had the beginning, you know act 1, act 2, act 3, act 4. Is it going to be 3 minutes, is it going to be 10 minutes? How long is it going to be?" he says.

"You've got to start out easy, because it's a long program, and you don't want to be, you know, in a coffin by the end of it every night. You want to meter it out. So it starts easy, brings people in, they get it, and then we said, ok, at some point, we've got to shut up and skate. And that was literally the phrase we used. 'So now just shut up and skate.' And then the big finish, and then the big band..you know the big band's gotta come back in."

With all these components to hash out and put in place, "it was about two good months of a couple of three days a week, working on it from like 8 in the morning until noon." For Geoffrey, the time flew by, working in sympatico with the like-minded Kurt.

"To me, that's the best fun, that's why I'm in this business. To make something that was never there before. And the truth is, I found that that's exactly what Kurt likes to do. He likes to do something new. He didn't want to do something he'd done before. And for someone who's been in this career for so long, and has done so well, who doesn't have to put that kind of effort into something, he really likes to do that. And so do I. So it ended up being just a kind of perfect working environment for both of us."

Steppin' Out of Neverland

After those months of work and creative development, Geoffrey and Kurt had a finished product that they liked. But would audiences like it?

"When you're doing something brand new, that doesn't have any sort of history to it, you just don't know how people are going to react. You never know. It doesn't matter how happy we were with it. The next stage is putting it up in front of an audience," he says. "There's never a guarantee of how an audience will react. Whether they'll enjoy it or not, or understand it, or really take to it."

The finishing touches and final recorded masters of the music came together just days before Kurt premiered the program at opening night of Stars on Ice in Lake Placid.

"I know he was nervous. He was also really tired, too, he was very busy right before that. And I was very nervous, 'cause all I could think of is, 'please don't screw up the reputation of the four-time world champion Kurt Browning, just because you wanted to play and have fun.'"

By all accounts, Steppin' Out Of My Mind had a great debut, and the audience took to it right away. Kurt went on to perform the program in several holiday shows in December. However, Geoffrey and Kurt weren't content to just leave it at that. They continued to refine the program as they got a better sense for how it was being received by audiences.

"Once the audience hears it and sees it, then you can start to really figure out what the little nuances are that can help clarify it, clean it up. You start to go 'you know, I don't think they're hearing that little bit.' Or you know, maybe I'm speaking too fast there. Or maybe we've got a couple extra ideas in here that they can't follow," he says. "Once you get it in front of an audience, that's your next task, to sort of fine tune it in front of an audience. I still think it worked the first time, we just made it that little bit better for the next few times."

Having developed and refined the program for North American audiences, they were then presented with yet another challenge - how to shape the program for a Japanese audience? Would the Stars on Ice audiences in Japan be able to fully appreciate a program where an English voiceover was such an integral component? What unexpectedly ended up being a bigger issue was the length of the program, a problem that was ultimately much harder to solve without completely tearing the program apart.

"It was longer than they were used to. Literally they said to him 'It's very good, we really like it, but can it be very much shorter?'. And now that was the dilemma, because the way it's structured, it can't really. You'd have to do some major work," he explains.

After debating possible alternatives, "[Kurt] finally said in the end, 'you know what, this is a problem that I can't solve.' So he just left it. He said, ok I'm going to do the program for the live audience that's there, and then sort of let the Japanese deal with it when it comes to editing it for television. Then that way they can edit whatever they want."

Geoffrey is conscious that this wasn't a perfect solution, but "hopefully people still enjoyed it."

While the program has been developed specifically for the Stars on Ice tour, with the assumption that the audience would largely be comprised of North Americans who would understand the voiceover, Kurt and Geoffrey were very aware of the importance of not making the program so concept-centric that it lived or died by the voiceover.

"We said [when we were working it], we've got to make sure that if there's no voiceover, that it's still just something interesting to watch. And so, we really choreographed most of it before we solidified what we were going to say. We just thought, you know what, if worst comes to worst, and the voiceover doesn't work, we get rid of it and it's just a cool program."

Taking it on the road

For all of Geoffrey Tyler's experience in music, writing, and directing, he is first and foremost a performer, a fact that Kurt did not forget. Despite the fact that Stars on Ice typically does not have live musical performers, Kurt quickly turned a plan for Geoffrey to come see the program on tour into an invitation to have him sing live.

"We decided that I would just come down and hang out and get to see the program in the environment," he explains. "And that's when he said 'well do you want to sing?' And literally I was like 'uh..ahh..uh.. I don't know!' and then I thought, what the hell, why not?"

Kurt wasn't done, though. As audiences in Boston, DC, Cleveland, and Toronto may have noticed, Geoffrey's singing location was quite different from that of the typical musical performer at a skating show.

"I get there, and I'm literally expecting to be standing on the edge of the ice. Just like on the carpet and just sing. And he said 'well get your skates on!'" he laughs. "So we're skating around, and he says 'yeah, you should do it on the ice'. And I was like (laughing) 'uh..all right..are you sure?' And he's like, 'yeah! absolutely!'"

Which is how Geoffrey ended up performing in figure skates, quietly moving around the periphery of the ice so he could be the one to toss the hat and cane to Kurt, as well as singing.

"I'm very comfortable on skates, so in the end, it really didn't matter if I was standing on the carpet or on the ice. My concern was that I didn't upstage him. I didn't want to take away from his program. It'd be nice to have a little enhancement - oh there's a singer! - but I just didn't want to take away from his work," he says.

Geoffrey may have done too good a job of trying not to upstage Kurt. Many have commented that his live vocal performance was so spot on, it sounded exactly like the recording, and that he was so not highlighted in the show that they didn't even realize he was there at first. Those who did notice him were very impressed by his vocal fidelity, which he attributes to his training as a live singer who is used to doing eight shows a week.

It is that skill which ironically means that, while he did sing in the Toronto show, Geoffrey will not be performing in any further shows on the Sears Stars on Ice tour. He is currently deep into rehearsals for a new musical, Ned Durango, at the Theatre Orangeville, which runs from May 5 through May 22.

Reflections

Although his foray into the world of figure skating is over for the time being, it's a world that he would be happy to revisit, particularly if he had the chance to work with Kurt Browning again.

"There's this thing these days where everyone's terrified to make a mistake. Everyone's terrified to do something that's slightly wrong, or not perfect, or not proven. One thing that I admire greatly about Kurt is that he's not really concerned about that. He'd rather do something new, that keeps him going to the next day, that keeps him getting out of bed, you know and going to the rink to figure stuff out."

"When you're working with Kurt, it's very different. Kurt's a very special performer. The things that I showed him how to do..the dance moves. Dancers have trouble doing that on firm ground. The fact that he was able to do them on skates is a remarkable thing. I mean, that's one of the reasons that makes Kurt so amazing, his footwork on the ice truly is quite incredible."

Asked if he would ever try his hand at figure skating choreography again, Geoffrey is hesitant but game to try it again if anyone was ever interested.

"It would have to be a special situation. I would certainly love to, but I don't know enough figure skating vocabulary. It would depend on the skater, obviously," he says. "I don't know, if somebody wants, give me a call! (laughs) We'll figure it out."

"To me it's all gravy, because it's nowhere I ever expected to be in my career. I mean as a young boy dreaming of Broadway, I still never expected to be singing in an arena with some of the best figure skaters in the entire world. That's just not something that ever sort of occurred to me. It was a lot of fun, and I would love to do it again, but if it never happened again, I'd still be thrilled. I'd be more than happy."

Ultimately, his response sounds a lot like something his friend Kurt Browning himself would say.

"You can't do any more than just put yourself out there, and say I'm game if you are. If it happened, if I got the opportunity again, sure, bring it. I'm willing to try anything."

Geoffrey Tyler can be seen in Ned Durango at the Theatre Orangeville in Orangeville, ON from May 5 - May 22. For more information: http://www.theatreorangeville.ca/2010/Ned-Durango.php



Thanks to Sharilyn Johnson for her help developing this article!